> >They are about the hottest food I can tolerate without physical pain. My mouth burns, and drinking water afterward feels just like how I would imagine it would feel if a bucket of water extinguished an actual fire on my body. What do less sensitive tasters than me taste when they eat those?
>
> As all curry enthusiasts (or chemists as they are known) know, drinking water after exposing the tissues of the mouth to capsaicin (the "hot" tasting compound)...

Is that just with curry, or with any hot spice? I have no idea if there was curry amongst the spices on those Doritos Extreme (maddeningly, all the ingredients list has to say is that there are "spices" in it -- what's the point of an ingredients list that's THAT vague??), but I suspect the primary source of hotness was chili powder. It's just a guess, though.

> ...tends to inflame the effect, not quench it.

Odd. I don't dispute you, because it seems you know more about the subject than I do, but I remember feeling quite a lot of pain *before* I had any water, and actually it was probably a good ten minutes before I gave up waiting for the burning sensation to go away on its own and took a drink of water to cool it off.

Capsaicin activates pain receptors in the mouth and makes your brain experience "heat" as a result without any real heat being there. The reason why this is pleasurable is that the body responds with a flush of chemicals that desensitise the tissue and repair the damage. The thing is, there is no damage, so you're just left with a tingly mouth.

> >I hear no accent in my own speech.
>
> Have you ever taped your own voice, listened to the playback and thought "wow, I speak in a monotone!"?

Ah, now you've opened up a whole new can of worms. I'm familiar with how one hears one's own voice differently than others do. So when I hear a recording of my own voice, it does indeed sound different, but it sounds like someone else with the same accent instead of a different accent.

I wonder how one makes that distinction. Same vowel sounds, but different overtones? Accents seem to differ primarily in the pronunciation vowel sounds, while overtones are what differentiates one voice from another.